"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 3 - When the Devil D" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

had ended up dropping two billion Posleen on the beleaguered planet. And it only took
two years for a Posleen to reach maturity. How many there were on Earth at this point
was impossible to estimate.
Of course not all of those had landed on North America. Indeed, compared to the
rest of the world the U.S. was relatively unscathed. Africa, with the exception of some
guerrilla activity in central jungles and South African ranges, had been virtually wiped
from the map as a "human" continent. Asia had suffered nearly as badly. The horselike
Posleen were at a distinct disadvantage in mountainous and jungle terrain, so portions of
Southeast Asia, especially the Himalayas, Burma and portions of Indochina, were still in
active resistance. But China and India were practically Posleen provinces. It had taken
the horses less than a month to cross China, repeating Mao's "Long March" and, along
the way, slaughtering a quarter of the Earth's population. Most of Australia and the
majority of South America, with the exception of the deep jungle and the Andes spine,
had fallen as well.
Europe was a massive battleground. The Posleen did poorly in extreme cold, not
from the cold so much as an inability to forage, so both the Scandinavian peninsula and
the Russian interior had been ignored. But Posleen forces had taken all of France and
Germany except portions of Bavaria and swept around in an unstoppable tide to take all
the North German plain to the edge of the Urals. There they had stopped more from
distaste for the conditions than any military resistance.
At this point there was resistance throughout the Alps and down through the Balkans
and Eastern Europe but the beleaguered survivors remained low on food, manufacturing
resources and hope. The rest of Europe, all of the lowlands and the bulk of the
historically "central" zones, were in Posleen hands.
 America, through a combination of luck, terrain and strategic ruthlessness had
managed to survive.
On both coasts there were plains which, except for specific cities, had been ceded to
the Posleen. But the north-south mountain ranges on both sides of the continent, along
with the Mississippi, had permitted the country to reconsolidate and even locally
counterattack.
In the West the vast bulk of the Rockies protected the interior, preventing a link-up
between the Posleen trapped in the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the
sea. That narrow strip of land, however, had once contained a sizable percentage of the
population of the U.S. and the effect of the dislocation and civilian loss there was
tremendous. In the end most of the residents of California, Washington and Oregon made
it to safe havens in the Rockies. Most of them found themselves in the still-building
underground cities, the "Sub-Urbs" recommended by the Galactics. There they sat,
working in underground factories to produce the materials the war needed and sending
forth their hale to defend the lines.
There were many untapped sources of materials in the Rockies and all of them were
being exploited, but what was missing was food production. Prior to the first landing all
holds had been released on agricultural production and the American agricultural
juggernaut had responded magnificently. But most of the spare food had ended up being
sent to the few fortified cities on the plains. They were scheduled to hold out for five
years and food was their overriding concern. So there was, elsewhere, a severe shortage
when the first massive landing occurred. Almost all the productive farmlands in the west,
with the exception of the Klamath Basin, had been captured by the Posleen. So most of
the food for the Western Sub-Urbs had to be provided over a long, thin link across the
Northern Plains following I-94 and the Santa Fe Railroad. Sever that link and eighty-five
million people would slowly starve to death.